Tag: longreads

Inside a Fusion Startup’s Insane, Top-Secret Opening Ceremony

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So the race is on to engineer an efficient surrounding for fusion. One of Fuse’s ideas is to get a bunch of big capacitors to discharge at once, thus kick-starting a reaction. That’s why, at our show, there were all those big caps behind the audience. (You also see constructions of big caps at other fusion startups, like Helion.) The goal of Fuse, as JC describes it, is to become the SpaceX of fusion, to enable “big tech” achievements with all kinds of partners.

Back to our story. JC contacts Serene and says we’re opening a second facility (the first was in Canada) and it would be nice to have a spectacular opening ceremony. Serene, being a startup founder who’s also, naturally, working on music robots, applies obsessive logistic efforts. Charlotte, being a director, does the same. Those of you with any life experience might be asking yourselves, “This sounds like an alien planet with two queens. Was it, um, a process?” I will not answer you directly except to compliment you on your finely hewn wisdom.

Now you know the basics. I am a scientist and do not enjoy superstitious takes on reality, but so many coincidences had to happen at just the right time for this show to come together in just a few weeks. At the last minute, we needed high-performance robots; a robotics professor at UC Berkeley, Ken Goldberg, found them for us. Why does reality synchronize like this sometimes?

I used to put on high-effort, high-tech music shows, often in VR, in the 1980s and ’90s. I burned out. It was bruisingly expensive, stressful, and exhausting. I used to long for the future when VR would get cheap and lots of people would know how to work with it. But when that time arrived, instead of relief, I had the feeling that VR had become too easy. There used to be a higher-stakes feeling. You had to make every triangle in the scene count, since there could not be too many, even though the computer doing the real-time graphics cost a million dollars. There’s a tangible sense of care in those earliest works.

If I longed for hassle and expense as guarantors of stakes, then I found them again in this show. The week leading up to the performance reminded me of those early days of VR. Late, late nights, which don’t come as easily to me as before, in rehearsal; Serene would be up there trapped in the cables and the mathematical dress, designed by Threeasfour, but there’s a timing problem with the robot motion. With assistance she frees herself, gets to a screen, and does 10 minutes of high-speed programming. The robots glide again.

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December 10, 2024
Tim Cook Wants Apple to Literally Save Your Life

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Every time I visit the Apple Park campus, my mind flashes to a tour I took months before construction was finished, when there was dust on the terrazzo floors and mud where lush vegetation now flourishes. My guide was Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. With a proprietor’s pride, he ushered me through the $5 billion circular colossus, explaining that committing to the new campus was a “100-year decision.”

Today I am returning to the Ring—pulsing with energy seven years after it opened—to see Cook again. The tech world is at an inflection point. The mightiest companies will either stumble or secure their dominance for decades. We are here to discuss Cook’s big move in this high-stakes environment: the impending release of Apple Intelligence, the company’s first significant offering in the white-hot field of generative AI. Some consider it belated. All year, Apple’s competitors have been gaining buzz, dazzling investors, and dominating the news cycle with their chatbots, while the world’s most valuable company (as I write) was showing off an expensive, bulky augmented-reality headset. Apple has to get AI right. Corporations, after all, are less likely than buildings to stand proud for a century.

Cook didn’t panic. Like his predecessor Steve Jobs, he doesn’t believe that first is best. “Classic Apple,” as he puts it, enters a cacophonous field of first-movers and, with a strong grasp of novelty versus utility, unveils products that make the latest technologies relatable and even sexy. Think back to how the iPod rethought digital music. It wasn’t the first MP3 player, but its compactness, ease of use, and integration with an online store thrilled people with a new way to consume their tunes.

Photograph: Joe Pugliese

Cook also contends that Apple has been preparing for the AI revolution all along. As far back as 2018, he poached Google’s top AI manager, John Giannandrea, for a rare expansion of the company’s senior vice president ranks. Then he pulled the plug on a long-running smart-car program (an open secret never publicly acknowledged by Apple) and marshaled the company’s machine-learning talent to build AI into its software products.

In June, Apple announced the results: a layer of AI for its whole product line. Cook had also brokered a deal with the gold standard in chatbots, OpenAI, so that his users could have access to ChatGPT. I’d gotten a few demos of what they were planning to reveal, including a tool to create custom emoji with verbal prompts and an easy-to-use AI picture generator called Image Playground. (I hadn’t yet tested the revivification of Siri, Apple’s lackluster AI agent.)

Perhaps what most distinguishes Apple’s AI—at least according to Apple—is its focus on privacy, a hallmark of the Cook regime. The AI tools, which are rolling out through software updates on the latest iPhone and relatively recent Macs, will largely run on the device itself—you don’t send your data to the cloud. The computation for more complicated AI tasks, Cook assures, occurs in secure regions of Apple’s data centers.

Another thing I’m reminded of on my return to the Ring is how skillful Cook is at touting the results of his big decisions, from the Apple Watch to his bet on custom silicon chips, which unleashed innovations that boost Apple phones and laptops. (And not mentioning decisions that didn’t pan out, like that multibillion-dollar smart-car project.) When he strolls into the conference room where we’re meeting, I know Cook will be meticulously cordial, displaying manners honed during his Alabama boyhood, while calmly hyperbolizing the virtues of Apple’s products and fending off criticisms of his very powerful company. (And when asked for comment on the election results, which came in after our talk, he chose to keep his views to himself.) Steve Jobs would come at a journalist like the rain in Buenaventura, aggressively pitching his message; Cook envelopes his interlocutors in a gentle mist and confides awed assessments of his company’s efforts.

The ultimate assessments, of course, will come from users. But if 40 years of covering Apple has taught me anything, it is this: Should this first iteration of AI fall short, an unrepentant Cook will show up at a future pretaped keynote hailing a new version as “the best Apple Intelligence we’ve ever built.” Despite all the pressure, Tim Cook never lets you see him sweat.

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December 4, 2024
How Murderbot Saved Martha Wells’ Life

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Murder is in the air. Everywhere I turn, I see images of a robot killing machine. Then I remind myself where I actually am: in a library lecture room on a college campus in East Texas. The air is a little musty with the smell of old books, and a middle-aged woman with wavy gray-brown hair bows her head as she takes the podium. She might appear a kindly librarian or a cat lady (confirmed), but her mind is a capacious galaxy of starships, flying bipeds, and ancient witches. She is Martha Wells, creator of Murderbot.

Hearing a name like that, you’d be forgiven for running for your life. But the thing about Murderbot—the thing that makes it one of the most beloved, iconic characters in modern-day science fiction—is just that: It’s not what it seems. For all its hugeness and energy-weaponized body armor, Murderbot is a softie. It’s socially awkward and appreciates sarcasm. Not only does it detest murdering, it wants to save human lives, and often does (at least when it’s not binge-watching its favorite TV shows). “As a heartless killing machine,” as Murderbot puts it, “I was a terrible failure.”

The character made its debut in Wells’ 2017 novella, All Systems Red. Yes, a novella: not exactly a popular form at the time, but it flew off the shelves, shocking even Wells’ publisher. In short order, more stories and novellas appeared, and then a couple of full-length novels. Wells scooped up every major award in the genre: four Hugos, two Nebulas, and six Locuses. By the time she and I started talking this past spring, Apple TV+ had begun filming a television adaptation starring Alexander Skarsgård.

At conventions and book signings around the world, Wells draws legions of fans, but here in Texas only about 30 people are nestled in the warm, wood-paneled library, which today is crammed with Murderbot art and paraphernalia. Wells begins by reading a short story, told from the perspective of a scientist who helps Murderbot gain its freedom. After the reading, a woman in the audience tells Wells how impressed she is by the subtlety of the social and political issues in the Murderbot stories. “Was that intentional?” the woman asks. Martha responds politely, affirming that it was, before saying: “I don’t think it’s particularly subtle.” It’s a slave narrative, she says. What’s annoying is when people don’t see that.

What’s also annoying is when people who’ve just discovered Murderbot wonder if she can write anything else. Wells, who is 60 years old, has averaged almost a book a year for more than three decades, ranging from palace intrigues to excursions into distant worlds populated by shapeshifters. But until Murderbot, Wells tended to fly just under the radar. One reason for that, I suspect, is location. Far from the usual literary enclaves of New York or Los Angeles, Wells has lived for all this time in College Station—which is where the nearly 100-year-old library we’re at today resides. Housed on the campus of Texas A&M, her alma mater, the library contains one of the largest collections of science fiction and fantasy in the world.

It’s from this cradle that Wells’ career sprang forth. But post-Murderbot, things have changed. Wells now counts among her friends literary superstars like N. K. Jemisin and Kate Elliott, to say nothing of her fiercely loyal fandom. And it turns out that she’d need all of it—the support, the community, even Murderbot—when, at the pinnacle of her newfound, later-in-life fame, everything threatened to come to an end.

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November 26, 2024
Relevant! Relevant! Relevant! At 50, Microsoft Is an AI Giant, Open-Source Lover, and as Bad as Ever

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No question about it: Nadella’s Microsoft is a triumph. Finally, in the 2020s, Microsoft has centered on the most innovative tech since the PC itself. And though revenues from AI products haven’t begun to offset Microsoft’s huge investments, it has the confidence—and the resources—to wait until the products improve and users find them useful.

But can Microsoft really avoid the hubris that set it so far back before? Consider what happened in May of this year with a product called Recall.

The feature was supposed to epitomize Microsoft’s integration of AI into its hardware, software, and infrastructure. The idea was to give users something like a personal version of the Internet Archive. Recall would constantly capture everything that happens in your machine: what you read, what you write, pictures and videos you look at, sites you visit. Simply describe to your machine what you’re looking for: What were those carpet samples I was considering for my living room? Where is that report about the ecology of the Amazon? When did I go to Paris? Those moments would pop up like magic, as if you had a homunculus that knew everything about you. It sounds scary—kind of like an onboard Big Brother—but Microsoft insisted users could feel safe. Everything stays on your computer!

Almost immediately, critics lambasted it as a privacy nightmare. For one thing, they noted, Recall worked by default and gobbled up your personal information, no matter how sensitive, without asking permission. While Microsoft has emphasized that only the user could access Recall, security researchers found “gaps you could drive a plane through,” as one tester put it.

“Within about 48 hours, we went from ‘Wow, this is extraordinarily exciting!’ to people expressing some reservations,” says Brad Smith. While the press was piling on, Smith was on a plane to meet Nadella in Washington, DC. By the time he landed, he figured it would be prudent to make Recall work only if users opted in; Nadella agreed. Meanwhile, in Redmond, Microsoft’s senior executives piled into meeting rooms to see how they might scale back the product. Fortunately, since the feature had not shipped yet, they didn’t have to recall Recall. They postponed the launch. And they would add security features, like “just in time” encryption.

“People pointed out some obvious things for us to do, which we should have caught,” Nadella says. But his own Responsible AI team missed them as well. A measure of “know-it-all”-ness had led to an announcement of a product that fell short, indicating that, even when led by a purported empath, Microsoft still retains too many of its earlier character flaws. Only now, it’s a $3 trillion company with locked-in access to the products of the leading-edge AI operation.

“You can think about it in one of two ways,” says Brad Smith. “One is, ‘Gee, I wish we would have thought about this before.’ Hindsight is a great thing. Or two, ‘Hey, it’s good that we’re using this to make this change—let’s be explicit about why.’ It was really a learning moment for the entire company.”

That’s fine. After 50 years, though, it’s a lesson that Microsoft—and Nadella—should have learned a long time ago.

Getty Images (timeline)

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November 21, 2024
Get in, Loser—We’re Chasing a Waymo Into the Future

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A third-generation San Franciscan, Gabe says he grew up playing with Nancy Pelosi’s kids and went to high school with Gavin Newsom, and now he’s a driver the way they’re politicians—it’s in his blood. He’s been operating taxicabs, Ubers, or Lyfts since 1995, and even helped organize a taxi workers’ strike in the late ’90s. He has also written about driving, ride-hailing, or motorcycling for the past two decades. And if you think we’re being silly about car-chase movie tropes, Gabe was a machine-gunner for the US Marines during the first Gulf War—so he is at least ex-military. He’s driving a gray Hyundai Ioniq 5 EV (9/10, WIRED recommends) and keeps his military service ribbons affixed to the dashboard. There’s also a 100-year-old ukulele poking out of the center console.

The chase begins as planned: One of us hails a Waymo a few blocks away, rides it to the edge of the parking lot, then bolts to join the others in our pursuit vehicle. “You know what you have to say, right?” Gabe says from the driver’s seat as we scramble to buckle up. WIRED blinks.

“Come on!” Gabe says. “Haven’t you ever seen old movies? You jump in the cab and you say, “Follow that car!”

But the Waymo just sits there. For two agonizing minutes. Plenty of time for us to stare awkwardly at our quarry—a vehicle whose shape recalls a cartoon shark with a bunch of spinning doodads implanted in its skin—as it stares back at us through its 29 cameras and five lidars, mapping our contours.

“It looks shy,” says Gabe.

“It’s ashamed. It’s so ashamed,” WIRED says. “It knows it’s being tricked.”

Then, at 10:42 am, the Waymo starts to move. WIRED shouts, “Follow that car!”

Less than a minute later, Gabe sighs. “I’m not used to driving this slow.”

Before we go any further, let’s get something out of the way: Riding around inside a self-driving vehicle, especially for the first time, is an immediately cool experience. It starts out like an amusement park ride—the empty gondola sidles up, you step in, you shut the door. Then it becomes the opposite of an amusement park ride. No thrills. No lurches. No clatter. Just you, some soft black leather, a default computer voice, and—for now—a steering wheel, ghostly turning this way and that.

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November 20, 2024
The Great American Microchip Mobilization

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Under Donald Trump and Joe Biden alike, the US has been determined to “reshore” chipmaking. Now money and colossal infrastructure are flowing to a vast Intel site in Ohio—just as the company may be falling apart.

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November 14, 2024
After the Election, California (Yes, That Hellscape) Will Keep Moving the World Forward No Matter What

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Just take the area of gasoline-powered transportation. After World War II, when American car culture was famously getting minted in Southern California, the state used a gas tax hike to build out one of the first modern freeway networks. In the ’50s, the US federal government borrowed that same model to construct the interstate highway system. Then, starting in the 1980s, California led the fight against leaded gasoline, eventually banning its sale in 1992, four years before the US as a whole did the same. In 2019, after Donald Trump’s administration rolled back emissions standards for cars, California struck a deal with the world’s leading carmakers, from Ford to Honda to VW and BMW—to make existing standards even tougher in the face of climate change. The size of the California market made this a de facto national standard (which the Biden administration later ratified).

It would be one thing if this were just a history lesson. But the same kind of dynamic is playing out right now in a few crucial arenas that virtually no one beyond California is talking about. And I’m happy to report that the America taking shape on its Pacific coast is again inventing solutions far more rapidly than conventional wisdom has accounted for.

I was bullish on these emerging transformations even before Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president. If she wins, what she knows from California will presumably affect her approach to the country and the world. Her California-ness is one of the least-discussed but most important aspects of her, including the upbeat approach to today’s diversity and tomorrow’s opportunities that is such a contrast to Donald Trump.

But if she doesn’t get that far, California is likely to chug along with all the more purpose, maintaining its nation-scale example of how else things can be done. Whoever guides national politics, California deserves new attention as the “reinvention state” rather than a “resistance state.” Even under Trump, there’s still a good chance that as California goes, so eventually goes the country, and eventually much of the world. Here are a few illustrations of where it’s headed. None of these is “the” solution to California’s many problems. But each of them illustrates the creative spirit from which solutions have always come.

Train to Somewhere

For starters, let’s return to the thread of transportation: By now, of course, the pioneering freeway system California built in the 20th century is a maxed-out, congested mess. And the state cannot build more freeways; where they’re needed, there’s no more room, and any that are built fill up as soon as they’re opened. Without new forms of transportation, the state will become increasingly paralyzed, and all its other problems will become worse. Which is why, back in 2008, California voters approved a nearly $10 billion initial bond issue to build a high-speed rail line eventually running some 500 miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco, through the Central Valley corridor. That was 16 years ago. If you’ve heard anything at all about this project since then, it’s that it is a white elephant, a doomed relic, a cautionary lesson, and any other metaphor for failure you might choose.

And yes, the complaint list is long. The project is way over budget (to the tune of $100 billion) and far behind its original schedule. Parts of the line were supposed to be up and running already. As it is, the first service isn’t projected to begin until 2030—and then only on the 171-mile segment from Merced, in the northern half of California’s Central Valley, to Bakersfield, on the southern end. This abbreviated initial route has been dubbed a “train to nowhere,” a stock insult that grates on people in the Central Valley but captures the frustration of people stuck in LA or Bay Area traffic. And given how the entire funding-hungry project has become an object of the culture wars, it is little wonder that for many, the project seems as remote and implausible as human settlements on Mars.

But I’ve been following the back-and-forth for more than a decade, and I’ve started to see California’s high-speed rail project with a new clarity. In the aviation world, pilots are trained to recognize the “point of no return,” when you’ve gone so far that you’d only lose by going back. That’s where California is with high-speed rail. Consider the weight of a few recent facts: This summer the project received full “environmental clearance” for the entire 463 miles from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco, with clearance for a further 31 miles from LA to Anaheim expected next year. Nearly all of the thousands of necessary land parcels have been secured. Construction in the Central Valley is much further along than most people realize: Some 12,000 people have long been at work there, and test trains should be running in three or four years. And what hasn’t sunk in is that, when done, this will be among the very fastest mainline high-speed rail systems running anywhere on Earth. (At 220 mph, it would beat the 200-mph range for European trains and the famed Shinkansen in Japan, or match the fastest stretches of the Beijing-to-Shanghai line in China.) Not only that, in a worldwide first, California’s system will use solar-generated electricity the entire way.

Over the past decade, I’ve visited Fresno, the biggest city along the initial route (population 545,000), about a dozen times. There and in surrounding areas you can see the rail taking shape month by month, mile by mile. You see the kind of gigantic, heavy-industrial construction projects I remember from living in China, when a new subway line seemed to be opening every month. You see earth movers bigger than school buses; concrete bridge-supports as long as airliners.

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October 31, 2024
‘We Were Wrong’: An Oral History of WIRED’s Original Website

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Kevin: When we went to do the IPO, it was very, very clear that the digital side was far more valuable than the magazine side. That was the beginning of the craziness. Here’s a magazine that has a lot of revenue, respectability, great enthusiasm, and support from the readership. And here’s this really weird digital side that’s worth 10 times the magazine.

Jane: When Condé Nast bought WIRED and Lycos bought HotWired, the company combined was worth less than the company separated. To this day, we liken it to Nike deciding to sell their footwear to Puma and their apparel to Adidas. Why would you do that? Why would you take the premier brand that had both the technical credibility as well as the upside of the lifestyle and culture stuff and pull it apart?

Jeff: It was a very traditional and typical tech acquisition where the startup gets acquired and comes into the bigger corporate culture. It just doesn’t work very well.

Jane: Louis and I were so crestfallen, heartbroken, and devastated, and everyone’s like, “Yeah, but everyone got rich.” That was not the point. It was a very, very difficult time.

June: Almost all of us started to feel a pretty profound sense of loss and grief that the culture we knew, the values we believed in as innovators and creators, had been lost. That the industry was no longer about innovation, invention, creativity, and certainly not about democratization. That everything was about money.

Well, maybe. There are 5.45 billion internet users on planet Earth, and sure, some of them are bad actors—no argument from WIRED. But most of us are still raving around the internet, hanging with pals, cruising for jobs and mates, catching up on gossip and news, buying and selling stuff, and finding fellow travelers who share our woes and our passions. And, yes, a slice of us are into fraud, abuse, and bad ideology. Did HotWired not anticipate that humans would be human?

A day at the HotWired office

Photograph: Courtesy of Julie Chiron; TREATMENT: JAMES MARSHALL

Ian: Back in those days, we’d say, The nice thing about the internet is how safe it is. Everybody’s there to help you, and everybody just wants to do good things. People asked, Why require passwords for stuff, because who’s going to do anything terrible on the internet?

Kevin: Today, a new thing comes along and people immediately say, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s going to hurt me. It’s going to bite me.” That’s definitely a change that wasn’t present when we were starting.

Jeff: But nostalgia can be dangerous. It was really hard what we did, and stressful, and we didn’t know what we were doing. When people say, “If we could only go back to then,” I’m like, no, we only had modems. It was terrible.

John P: As a business, HotWired failed. But all that stuff that we were doing, it was scientific investigation.

Jonathan: We thought the internet was going to be good for people. We were wrong.

Jeff: I still feel like literally anybody with an idea can start hacking on the web or making apps or things like that. That’s all still there. I think the nucleus of what we started back then still exists on the web, and it still makes me really, really happy.

John: We were lucky with WIRED. With HotWired there was no choice, and we couldn’t do it differently if we went back and tried. But we were unlucky to be first.

Condé Nast eventually bought WIRED’s website too—in 2006.

Animation: James Marshall

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October 29, 2024
As Schools Ban Phones, More Kids Are Using Smartwatches

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“It seemed like I was opening Pandora’s box, when it wasn’t absolutely necessary,” she says of purchasing a smartwatch. (Still, she didn’t forswear technology entirely. Her daughter now bikes with a Wi-Fi–only tablet, connects it to the internet when she arrives at a friend’s house, and sends her mom a message on Facebook Messenger Kids letting her know she arrived safely.)

The possible drawbacks of smartwatch use extend beyond stunting character growth. Even though smartwatches are virtually unexplored in academic research and will require further study before anyone can say, conclusively, how they may affect kids and childhood, it’s clear that screens, in general, can cause children harm, Perry of Children and Screens argues.

“They interfere with so many aspects of child development,” she says, rattling off some examples: cognitive development, language development, social emotional and behavioral development, mental health.

True, the screen of a smartwatch is much smaller than that of a phone. Its functionalities are more limited. Some of the “irresistible” qualities of other devices are missing from smartwatches, Perry concedes. And even though most kids’ smartwatches come with games, they can be difficult to use and may deter kids from playing for long, or at all.

Still, that doesn’t make smartwatches safe from some of the addictive, distracting tendencies of phones, experts say. Watches vibrate, chime, and ping with notifications. They, like other devices, are built with persuasive design.

“The evidence is really clear that the notifications—the visual cues to look at your watch—those things are really disruptive and provide a real distraction from something else the child should be doing,” Perry says.

Teachers and school leaders would vouch for that.

“They’re disruptive, distracting,” says Joseph, the district leader in Maine. “It all just gets in the way of what teachers are trying to do.”

She doesn’t see watches and phones as being wholly different from one another, especially in middle and high school settings where, increasingly, students have both devices with them during the school day. A phone may be put away, out of sight, but the watch on a student’s wrist will still be buzzing with news alerts, incoming text messages and photos, social media notifications, and the like.

Joseph’s school district, RSU 1, encompassing a small coastal region of Maine, updated its device policy over the summer, at a time when many schools and districts opted to do the same. Except, unlike RSU 1, most districts are narrowly focused on the potential harms of smartphones, multiple people shared in interviews. Their revised policies may not even mention smartwatches, creating a loophole for those devices.

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October 29, 2024
Bobbi Althoff on Exactly How She Got Rich—and How Rich, Exactly

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Well actually WIRED shares a parent company with Reddit.

Good. Get rid of it.

What’s the part of all of it that feels the weirdest to you still? Is it weird to have something happen in your life and have to issue a statement about it on Instagram?

It’s weird that if I say anything, it’s going to get press. And sometimes I don’t think about that. So when I decided to post an Instagram Story two weeks ago and be like, “I have never slept with someone I interviewed,” I did not expect to wake up to an email from my PR team being like, “Here’s all the news, the press you got from this.” Or when I got a divorce, having paparazzi show up at my house, I was like: “A. How did they figure out where I live? B. Why do they need to take photos of me walking without a wedding ring on?”

It is kind of crazy. Are you in a good place in all of that personal stuff?

A lot of people still really give me a hard time because I’m no longer with my children’s father. I was 22 when I got married.

I didn’t know if we were going to talk about this. But I got married when I was 21.

Did you?

And I got divorced. I was going to offer to tell you about my divorce if it would help you talk about yours. Because I married an abolitionist vegan in college. Special. And I was also vegan and then was seeing a doctor. I was vegan because I was starving myself.

Oh my god.

I went to see a doctor and the doctor was like, “You have to start eating dairy. Katie, you have to start eating some sort of animal product. You have to gain weight.” So I started eating yogurt, and I called my husband, because we were living in different cities at the time, and I said, “There are two things I need to tell you. One is that I started smoking.” And he was like, “That’s hilarious. I never would’ve pictured you as a smoker.” And I said, “And the other thing is that I started eating yogurt.” And he was like, “I’m done.”

No way. Your husband.

My husband. And we got divorced because I ate—

Yogurt.

A Fage 0 percent plain.

It’s so easy to look at the future and be like, you get married and you stay married forever. We had kids immediately. I got pregnant 10 months after knowing him, maybe 11 months. And then at a year marker we’re getting married. We got married in the courthouse.

As a kid, I saw my parents being horrible together. Horrible. Truly, truly, truly. The worst possible couple that could be together.

Are they still married?

No. And I remember the day that my mom told us they were getting divorced was the best day of my life.

I read online that the best time to get a divorce and for it to have the least impact on your kids is before they turn 3. When my daughter was 3 I remember it was just, if we are going to do this, it needs to be now, because our kids won’t know. It wasn’t like my parents, but we weren’t in love.

And by then you must’ve had some financial independence.

The timing lined up perfectly with me getting a lot of money. Once I knew my career was going to take off, I was OK. And we had the conversation and it was a joint conversation of, “this isn’t good anyway.”

Do you want to get married again?

I would love to get married and have all of the things that I never got. I want to meet someone, date them for a while, have them surprise me with an engagement ring, and then get married and have a big wedding and lots of family and friends there. I want to be disgustingly in love one day.

Well, I’m sure all your fans on Reddit will read this interview and take notes.

Oh, they will.

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October 2, 2024